The Towers dropped to their
knees in abject despair.  Gone
were the friends who decorated
the windows, hallways, and
who wore flowers in their hair.

Gone were the days and nights
of light shows on hanging
gardens.  The Towers fell down
in pieces that no Kingsmen
could put together again.  Time
screamed in tatters of suits
and dresses.  The restaurant's
water boiled.  The Maitre 'd dropped to his knees, fell
through the floor.

The Towers were gone to
soldiers everyone.  More
elusive were the fragments
of burned bodies.  The screams
tore through the morning.
Sirens drowned the bells
and still the sounds of sudden
grit-filled voices cry.

The Towers brought more
sorrow to the flowers still
showing in the tears of lost
souls watching an end to
mercy.

Never to leave the shadows
of nightmares, the Towers
will live on in perpetually
beating hearts.   No one
forgets the morning the
sunlight was betrayed by the soulless murderers whose airplanes slit the air like silver bombs. Rogue foreign pilots with death scheduled for our
September morning.

We will continue our elegiac
song of Remembering.

Forever.



Caroline Shank
9.11.20

It's a movie afternoon.  On the
menu today is Stephen King.
Pennywise, gruesome and
gore.  Sit tight the clown
is coming. Up and over,
round and round.  Balloons
rip the fragile air,  Screams
tear through today.

The sewer is full of blood.
The axel-tree is full of mud.
I see it in the look of his
face.  "I'm coming!" is his
insistent cry.

Who's in there now? Go in
and see. I am bound to a
mixture of fear.  Stir me up.
Tap off the movie.  He is
scared even as he writes.

I turn around and see the
clown.  He melts into me.
I only know enough
to run scared.

I am bound for the after-
noon train to Derry.

Caroline Shank

Morning drips in like coffee.
I think of you. It is the
hardest time.  I begin the
day in sips. My tongue
burns with greed.

You seep in through the
slats of my sleepy windows.
The day starts with memory.
Your red hair curls
around the sun.  I reach out to
touch you.  I want to kiss
the blue of your eyes across
the table.

I, sadly, drink the dregs of
my morning, wash the azure
off my face and dry my tears
to carry me through to
tomorrow.

Mornings drip in like coffee.
I think of you.

Caroline Shank

You were always on the edge
of someone's disaster Mikey.
You sailed through days
with no wind.
Swam when the boat tipped,
sailed alone when it didn't.

You needed wings to soar above,
a paddle to stay upright.
You did not trust the water,
the air, the shore, the fire.

You were upside down,
you lost the rope.
you cut loose.

You are nobody's
adventure now.

Not even the rain.

Caroline Shank

I am Pandora. I have let everything escape.  My days are filled with searching. Mostly I look for you.

I can't gather the misguided
objects which surround me now. I
need to fight for the mountain
tops and silver lakes I knew
when we were young.

Are you still among the reeds
and shells of lost nights and
trodden days.  Memories dip
around me.

Say it isn't so, that you have
shorn your curls, pantsed your
youth and wiped the shy
calendar on the grass where
we talked into the night.

I try to return hope to the
broken  container but
it cuts my hands.  The
contents dive at me
like yellow birds in
a banana tree,

I am alone among the
troubles.  I am wrapped
in the moods of
silence.

I curve around the center,
gather your image
in my graying
locks.

Caroline Shank

The jukebox was the only light
in the tavern.  
We were alone in the dry
recess of a lonely world.
You sang in my ear while
I swayed to your rhythm.

The song was a long low
cry.  I was urgent
in your embrace.  

I am reminded of that night
you walked away from me in
the damp laundry of dawn.

Turn around to face me,
the climate of my lonely
arms.

Hold me again to the tick
of memory so I can,
once more, dance
close to you.

Regardez moi
mon amour.




Caroline Shank

I'm pretty easy to find.
All you have to do is
think of me.  I sigh
in your soul but you
can't feel me anymore.

I have started to move
now. Can you tell? I am
limber again after all the
years you have me buried
in your memory.

I come to you on a breeze.
I wake you up this
anniversary of our melody

and I sing about the air that
we breathed.  The last time
that we shared a joint

adventure

Caroline Shank

I thought you were good
for me, but you're not.  You
are pretty and you sound
like a soft summer wind
whistling through tall grasses.

You have so many sides.
You run your hand down
the gentle nubs of my thoughts.
One side caresses and another
side wounds.

You rain along my stem.
A footprint on my
back, a signature to
an iambic attempt.

Your voice is the poem.
The sound of absurdity
is the dilemma.



Caroline Shank

I see you every
night elongated in warm
dreams on Summer skies.

I touch my face with
your memory now still warm.
My fingers smooth tears.

I am sad in the
act of kissing you. Goodbye
is a sorry dream.

I see you every
day through the scrim on the
Proscenium stage.

Goodnight Sweet Prince I
knew you well. I hold you still
in my folded hands.

Caroline Shank

You can't reverse the dying
of a leaf. Even if it is not fully
in the ripeness of its demise.

The yellow stripe of incipient
decay that rides the center
of the foliage is only the
beginning.  The curled
edges follow and if there
is a flower it will float down
very shortly.

Love like death takes
its time with all things.  
Toes and fingers curl in a semblance of sadness.  
The veins break
like old thread.  

Both leave in their own season,
in short gasps.  The last thing
to go is the stem. The *******
resonance of a long goodbye.

It rejects the unction
of extreme prayers
left on the
knuckle of loss.


Caroline Shank

I write to know that I'm
alive.  Someone else said
that. I just can't remember
who.  I write the vowels
and consonants of the
swirls of my own life.

I remember in the first place
the keys that opened the
doors of wonder.  Not always
a good thing I can assure you.
Growing up was filled noise.

Secondly I remember the
troubles.  Years of pale white
when I witnessed my mother's
bitterness, my father's
kindness, the worldmakers
of our youth.

Number three taught me
to breathe in the screams
of my mother's midnight
rantings. This is when I
taught myself to smoke. The
cancer of her determination
was to ruin us all.

I stopped counting.  My life
after girlhood, cowl
of stillborn years, trod the
boards of marriage and
babies.  

You were the pages without
names.  Months of writing
torn from a book and
saved.  Can you find me
like a lonely letter?

I write to remind you of the
vellum we shared, so briefly,
to which this lonely passage
belongs.

Find me.

Caroline Shank

There you go again
scaling the walls of
my scarred and forked
emotions.  I cover the
limbs which you have
not as yet noticed.

I hear you chanting.
I shiver as you dance
around the soft underbelly
of yesterday.

If I could tell you that
which I know to be
true would you stop
your blue colored cry
to be love touched?

Could we but begin the
music again?  I don't know
what the years of our separation will bring, I only know
that we are soft
sound on skin.

Tango me esta noche.


Caroline Shank

The archaic symbols of the dream
appear nightly stained on some
gigantic scrim.  There’s a battle
going on in one corner, a damsel
is at stake of course; her favors
his reward.  Somewhere else is a
monkey holding a tin cup and
pant-hooting at passers by.
There will be some trouble if he
doesn’t get his pennies.  More
I suppose if he does.

A man and a woman face each other;
she prepares bandages for his war.
The problem is she can’t reach the
victims he piles up.

Birds fly, horses fly, lizards slither
out of holes each with pieces of’
paper fluttering from their mouths.
The paper disappears leaving only
sockets without sound.

The dream is incomplete without the man,
standing still in the middle, his spear
pointed up.  He cannot move
and the tears on his face
are children.



11/11/80


CSS publications 2nd place winner 8/84  $25.00

I’ve said it now, twice;
I’ll be dead by Thanksgiving.
November is the cruelest month.
That’s when it happened to you
Ma.  You left with the harvest,
reaped by the devil cells
bearing their fruit in your
bloated throat.

You fell to the floor, rotten
from having hung too long
in your ***** cellar.

I wish you’d died in
But no, you waited
to see me grown, my own
body breeding your foul
flowers.

Now I am broken in my stem
and unpollinated in my mind.
I wait for some death
(I’ll take any) and inch
by inch boredom chokes me.

I cannot outlast this harvest.
I’ll die before you did
with both ******* on
and sober.


Caroline Shank

The neon sign writes
against the dark.
Let's stop for a beer.  It
has been a long time.  
It's crowded
in here tonight
crushed with the
sketches of people
we once knew. ..

Just a quick one
before we reescape into the
dream. I will wait for you
at the table by the door,
watch you bring again
the ale of our last
date.  

Little did we know
the years would be so
cruel. We will reach,
once more,
each to the other, in this
smoky bar. ..

Y Not?


Caroline Shank

Sometimes she is so tired
she can feel the trees grow.
The slow wind on the bark
draws infinite sighs.

Her breath is elongated along
the wood's facade from morning
until night.  She looks toward the
future with her eyes forever
drawn, wistful and cased with
time's awful drudge.

It is not about the wind she
thinks, but the weary sound of
silence until you return.

The circadian rhythm of life
will resume after the war.
Along the hours granted
in your reunion, she will move
with cellular efficiency.  

Time will beat soon,
please God,
in sinus predictability .



Caroline Shank

I am bent in half, sitting in my
chair.  My arms are covered with
crawling things.  My face itches.
My folded feet are cramped.

My stomach is collapsing and
my lungs gasp for air. I walk
upright so you won't hear
the breaths that tear ever so
quietly from the deep place
where terror thrums the
center of me.

I get up everyday
to the steel strings of my
unconscious.  My head
listens for something
I cannot hear.

Panic, like a guitar,
strums in my gut.  
It plays me and
I shake.

I pick this up, my
shattered life,
and I go on…

Dear Jesus, I go on…


Caroline Shank

I have seen my shadow lying
on the playground of your
mind, and I was aware.

I have heard you sing my song
and I was taken.  Have you
seen me running to the beat,
beat, beat of your steps tapping
on the paths where we stopped
that day we made love in the
garden of the old house?

I'd have chased your music
into that tomorrow rain if you'd
asked.  I slipped behind the
tree to wait.  I saw you
running on the sunbeam,
down by the river, dancing
like a dandelion spore
on the breeze of evening.

I called you and you waved
your panama in the vestiges
of my dream.

Was it all imagination then?
running down my mind.
Touch me again where
you counted my pulse
leaving me breathless
in the corners of my soul.
It was a sweet dream.

If you ever find me running
toward you stay for a time.
Turn around elusive piper,
my body moves to your song.

Dance with me when I am
dreaming. Throw me a kiss in the
Summer breeze that tastes
like forever in the space
before awakening.


Caroline Shank

I am the Audience.  I write
to hear what I have to say.
This jumble of verbs and
adjectives, this conglomeration
of images is my body.

These warts and crevices, the pocks
of my life roll up into
words.  I copy them in the winter
and I write with them in the
long summer mornings.

But you, you predate my vocabulary.
And I say to myself you Are.  I
make you from the letters of
experience.

How else to tell the world, and
I must tell the world, that I exist,
that you live.  You are the noun.
I write to keep myself formed
into the story we made.  You
are the Subject of this
safari through my bones and I
am the Author.

My pen spills, a diary of tight
lighting firing through the
ink.  I write to say you
exist.

I scribe this plot thralled
Gothic romance.  
The story is always the same.

You, you are alive somewhere
in the world of words
I create.

And I,
I am your god now.


Caroline Shank

Do you remember the rain?
You were soaked and the
only thing you heard was
my voice crying in the
wildness of that starless
night.

Later you were so calm.  
I was in a void,
medicated to save
my life.  We saw
each other across
the cigarettes of
scarred conversation.

Do you remember
your hands on my face?

Personne ne se souvient

Is it too much, this drought
of time? These long misted
years clutch the past
like a pout of pain.



Caroline Shank

My Daughter Near Drowning
  in Lake Michigan
     Seven years old



So cold and still her eyes looked
up at running me.  Glass is like
the water between us.  I am
Christ.  I never felt the wet
and never sank.  I reached
her through the mirror of
myself.

I am her god now.


Caroline Shank

My Daughter Finding Fossils
    Lake Michigan
    (Nine years old)



Early morning beached bones
and million-year-old rocks
whisper, “Little girl?”.
She stops.  The socks she
carries rattle full of rocks.
She hears the one she wants.

She calls, “Mommy, look!”.
She thinks the fossil has smiles
I can see.  Ah, I haven’t seen
fossil smiles since I was nine
and curly and cradling my own
socky bundle by the beach
of little mouths calling to
little girls of fossil dreams,
fossil futures, and stone-hard
fossil love.

Caroline Shank

I write this poem as memory.
The warm night we danced
over the pizza place to "Me and
Mrs. Jones." or the trip to the
museum.  

We were tan and
dressed in white.  Summer
was knocking and we
opened the door.

It was a fine door.  We didn't
know then that the wind from
Canada was coming for us.
We drank as we shared
your jacket.

"Listen" you warned me you
were leaving, calling me to wrap
your fleeing shadow around
the mannequin of July.  "Listen"
pounding in my head.

I write you into poetry 46 years
later.  See, I hold your flame in
my hands. Drops of ash in
a goblet of memory.


Caroline Shank

At what point do I cross over
to the unknown spaces?
Fires carve.  Smoke
marks the places of memory.

"Beyond this point there be
dragons."  

I run to the flat humid
edge of the world.
Under my feet is lava.  
"Is this a dream? "
I ask the lone
sparrow.

"Hurry" he said "Run
before
the wind loosens your
madness."

There is no room to
sit in this desolate
geography.  I am bound
to the edge with laces.

Call the naked lion.
Retrieve for me
the last vestige of sanity.
The remnants of sensation.

I remain alone on the
precipice of thought.
Find me, if you can,
amid the char and
debris of your last

goodbye.  


Caroline Shank

I wait for the cold dark to run
like *** down my chin.

I wait for the sun to round
the side of my building
bringing tomorrow's promise.

It was always to be tomorrow
when I taste your licorice flavored
mouth again.

I wait like the Oracle said,
for the time when the gods
will bring you to my song.

I wait. Coltrane blowing
forever in my heart.  

Forever, the saxophone,
your breath,
in my hair.

I wait for tomorrow. For music.
For wine.  A song to
sing to the empty nights.
I drink to the miles into
darkness…



Caroline Shank

" There are only four questions of value in life, Don Octavio.
What is sacred?
Of what is the spirit made?
What is worth living for,
and what is worth dying for?

The answer to each is the same:
only love."

From don Juan de Marco



Where are you now when songs
get blown and dance in the turf
of memory?  I find the ends of
everyday strings tie the knots
knitted from songs I've heard
and poems I've written.

Four questions are unanswered
Don Octavio.  I travel over years
undone or never to be.  My mind
unknits the warm nights, the chirp
of insects, the swarm so thick
we could not make love in the
dark, by the lake.

No answers swim into my mind.
No questions fall to the ground.
My gown remains laced.  You
touched me under the ties but
you left me in the rain, unanswered,
unable to return to the capsule
out of which time begat those
four questions.  

Look for the answers under the
salt of my tears and find only
smears.  My tears are no reply.




Caroline Shank

Why, when I need sanity most,
do I find confusion
surfacing around me.

Tell me you love or tell me you
don't.  Speak plainly, without rancor
or condescension.  For
Heaven's sake quit
confounding me with erudition.

You know enough
the way to get in
touch with the skin
of meaning.  

Rub me on my fingertips.
Feel my heartbeats.
I feel you in the cradle of my
old age.

Lead me not into temptation.
But deliver me from confusion.
forever and ever.

Amen

Caroline Shank

Run with me Sammy
Hold onto the trails of
imagination. I love 
your touch.
You pour through
the branches of my life
like sunbeams through
cognac.

Caroline Shank

Sunshine on bare ground.  Acorns
fall off live oaks.  The shade
creeps where last year flowers
grew.  The planet is off its axis
and I am alone.

No language leaves splats where
before the sunlight shone in a
poem of great beauty.
Tears now nurture time's
becoming.

Trust the only thing that has been
ever true.  Goodbye has many
leaves.   It yields stones among
the twigs, fruit that is puny
and wee.


Caroline Shank

It's all behind me now.  The
days of wine and roses, and you.
I was young in the tender
of my years.  

You were curled and red, the
tight nights of summer dimmed
my eyes.  The breezes
of June were wrapped embraces.

In these, my last years here, I dwell
on summer.  No matter the cold of
Wisconsin, it's the brilliance of
then that I rub on my face like
fine oil.  I remember the incense.
The musk of your scent
lingers.

We were a tune that played for
the span of one summer.  It
is as strong in my memory as ever
were your hands on my face.  

Once when I loved you,
almost fifty summers ago, I
promised I wouldn't hurt you.
But you left me to
broken poems.

I am wooden in my age
and I dance with hard
shoes.  The days are
long and the nights
no longer sing.

Caroline Shank

Don't lead me down that path.
That trodden split concrete lump
of sameness you called your
love.  I've tripped before on
that sidewalk of belief.  

Don't place my hand over your
sorry song.  The beat is slack,
the rhythm is tired. I have heard
more poems in Heaven and Earth
than are imagined in
your philosophy Horatio.

Walk off the curb where no
fence is.  There you will
find your blind way.  Don't
grasp for daisies

when you find the end of the
journey.  You will trip
on the  lines I draw
with chalk made of
tears and dust.

Caroline Shank

My life, then, hung like a
sun-yellow mobile that spun
in the heat as I flowed from
one end of summer to the other.
The songs on the radio were
my island.  My life as a girl
in the years before fences
appears in memory slides,
dressed in the beaches of  
youth.

I grew from seeds to roses in
the ground of my childhood
summers.  In the calendar of
my life as a young girl
every date prefigured you.
Day by day, in the years of
growing I bought, with the
barter of my soul, all the
heat and all the music.

Battened by the times before
you, strengthened by long
storms, hot suns, cold winds,
this, then is what I offer
you:  deep beaches, thornworn
roses, summers that flow
from one end of your life
to the other.

Caroline Shank

You write of
another love.  
You care not for the
tear of pain on a
bruised heart.

The past
cracks like shell. Poems
fall to the ground. There are
memories underneath my back.

Say nothing. Go to
the end of the day in your
safe place.

I release your voice.  I sing
to myself where you once sang,
unafraid.

Take me not to your happiness.
I drop down a rope
of words.
I will swing myself above  
memory.

Caroline Shank

.
Candles light the way to my worn
torn books.  I read every night.  The
covers loosened from the binding.

It is a fragile thing that I have come
here to write you.  I am a little out of
shape.  The company of great
writers intimidate me. I am wrapped around the stylus of an idea.  

In some way think of this as an
entry into my thoughts.  Are you
interested in the nocturnal rambling
of my old, my favorite phrases?

Something in me likes to hear you,
in your deep voice, read to me what
I write.  My imagination startles me.

The candles are burnt enough.  
You will not return to this library
which you began so long ago.

I write to you in my diary,
Harker, words you fling from the
runaway carriage window.

I will never die and I will look
for you in my books forever.

I listen to the wind through
the pages.

Caroline Shank

Time eclipsed.
The hours
dose the day.
I am ungood at social
graces.

For what are we to do?
Knowing this?

Apologies skip stones
across thought. I drown
in regret. I am older
not better.

I chase all the live-long
day, calm the tired
minutes
Frown the ridiculous
heart.

But,

I bloom for you.

Caroline Shank

There is  something in the
air that moves me forward
always off balance, as a
thought glances by me and
is quickly forgotten.  

There is a law someone
never told me.
When I was younger I lived
unbothered by the whims
and movements of change.  
Now I cling, precariously,
to a life untethered.

I see my lorn form
change in the whisp
of a moment.

Regardez moi,
je pleure



Caroline Shank

You left her
on the pale of an old wound. Just When She Needed You Most. It's
true that the world is a flat rockfilled
place.

For years she worked a new garden.
Now the songs
are warped and the plants
won't grow.

Her ramblings stutter.
But  offer
a small breath in her direction
and she dances.

Combien Monsieur for some air
you breathed, for a flower you
grew, flesh to the perfect
old dream?


Caroline Shank

I have rebuilt so many times. Every
love is a dispair.  I have room for
none but the lonely, the broken
pedestrians of time's sidewalks.

How old I am is irrelevant.  I
am tuned to the rhyming night.
I listen to the frogs mating in the
swamp, the crickets and, in
season, the cicadas who do not
love but for a breath.  

My house is now a ramshackle
of old memories, songs that
burn my fragile skin, and the
sloe gin of my youth.

You retain me, and in the end,
the currency of my life
is writ of you.

I have rebuilt so many times,
love's fires ring the sidewalk
around my memory .
I write of the past that
is in runes.  My thoughts enact
in me that youth that was always
yours to have and to hold.

We are all phantoms of our pasts.
We are rubbed with it. For you
my skin sings of the tight tan
you knew

once upon a time.

Caroline Shank

She drinks more coffee now and has
found new TV shows.  The figures
have melted into blurs of color.

She misses your sweetness and
your smells.  The kiss on her
cheek, the hand on her breast.
All gone.  The times they hsve
a changed.  

Music is her companion.  Bob
Dylan sings in her bluetoothed
ear.  She thinks of you.  She sends
her lonely love thru a mask of
gauze and presses her old face
against a window.

The virus that kept you away
holds her hostage to a long
wind.

She throws
a silent kiss.

And waves
thru her tears.

Caroline Shank

Your epiphany renders my life
mute.  You walk through a
cloud of happiness I cannot
share.

I don't want the remnants of
your friendship.  I pick through
your past digging for you.
You left me alone and I can't
dance to our song today.

Life was wrong to plant your
belongings in my torn house.

I will forever disremember you
as if you were a song I never
understood.  You are ephemeral
as smoke on glass.  The sun
no longer streams from you.


Caroline Shank

Will you make love to me in sunlight
and in the rain?   Will you sing to me
when the hours go by? I will be in
your voice calling.  

Will you make love to me in winter
when the pale day is soft
snow against the windows?  Will
your warm breath leave patterns
on my skin?

I will be your landscape.  My love
is an echo.  You will hear me
for years.  My soul is the perfect
moment melded with your kiss.

I want you to run with me toward
the early spring of our youth. To
remember beneath the kiss lies
love unparalled in literature.

No, not Tristan and Isolde, but
the coupled clutch itself opened.
Where they were unrequited we will
soar over wars and peace.

Will you love me tomorrow when
I am rubbed with age?  I will
be the first one to go to the
stars.  I will be brave today and
you can take my soul to Heaven.  
Will you still love me tomorrow?

I will love you after you are gone.
The tears of my memory will
outlast ever your casual goodbye.

Caroline Shank

My Forsythia has one lone yellow
flower.  A sapling.  The petals hover
close to the ground as if afraid of the
sunlight that shines a neon sign.
Maybe Spring is coming to this
chilly Wisconsin May?

The temperature dropped 10 points
just now.
There is snow on my mind.  After
all one yellow flower does not mean
others will follow.

I will take a look at it and see if I can
go on.  I too am lonely in my singular
stem of hope.  Summer will follow
at a distance.  Autumn will come
tromping behind the scenes of
sunlight on my garden.

Lord, what are gardens for?


Caroline Shank

Is there shelter from this storm?
The neurons rage at the
light that seeps through the
cracks, waiting for the prayer
to form from forgotten words.

The days are short, no more
gaps form between the two
waves of memory.  Gone
on some mornings is the
memory of the time before
the syllables of experience
faded into time.

There are many ways to make
a life over when the buoys
and markers are lost.

I will find you inside
your days and I will hone
your experience into
days you will not miss
and I will cry alone.

Caroline Shank

I'm looking for my husband.  He has
disappeared into some place inside
his mind, like a sea creature slides
into a coral bed.

Quick now, here he is for a moment
or an hour.  Like a Robin bobs in
the yard, he is beautiful in his song
before he vanishes into the sky,
flying above or around me.

Are his pieces forever gone? Will
I find a kiss behind my chair meant
for me alone? Will my sorrow erase
the years of love?

I will be brave today.  Tomorrow
I will be the coral he needs. A small
animal in a very large and
strange ocean. .

Caroline Shank

Finding Beauty


in brokenness is a
fine how do you do Ma

You broke me in slivery
pieces when I was a little
girl. I am crackled like
the century in which we
were born.

You died with the tainted
Soil still on your hands.
I outlived the strangled
ivey you plaited me with.

My mends are obvious.
Gold veined patches
wind through my skin.
I am not an art form.

I am good wood burned
dark for your satisfaction.
I peel off the bark.

I found not beauty, but
redemption in the years
beyond your death.  I am
unbounded and only
slightly born.  

Life is an adventure but
to you it was a safari.
Your family was your
prey but it's ok

I have found beauty in
my life anyway.  You almost
killed me.

But...

"That Which Does Not
**** Me Makes Me
Stronger"


Caroline Shank

I hope to see you soon,
in the morning with
rumpled hair and boxer
shorts.

I hope to see you soon,
when the Spring sun
is high and the blue of
your eyes wash the
shadows of separation
away.  

I hope to see you soon,
when stars crinkle the
daylight and the songs
of the night cricket
compline.

Will we walk the
lined path along the
beach of memory?

If there is nothing left
after the lighthouse has
gone dim and illness
separates us forever

know that I will be
there in the interstices
of our heart's last
singing.


Caroline Shank

I'm oh so far away from
where you are.

I have climbed your mountain
and found only scree and granite
at the top.

Others have been here and left
a stone.  I have nothing to leave
you but an empty dish. A cold
meal once eaten is like a frozen
embrace.  Empty is empty.

I am walking away from your
promise like a cat leaves a
deserted dish.

No! Do not touch me.  
Touch only the breeze as
I leave.  Do not speak to me

I lie
in the air,
crying with the
gulls.


I mourne
Kaddish.



Caroline Shank

It's the wartorn pedestrian
whose  tears fall on the
heart's side streets.

Veins of regret that curl
the same pain.  It's not
the sorrow that hurts, it's
the gullibility of time's
unlearn-ed lessons.

The old suffer
most.  The pandemic
of hope again in
the release of
lyrics left long ago.

The letdown lisps
it's own goodbye, prefigured
in the drawl of soft sighs.

Goodbye is muted
and falls to the floor.

It sinks to the power
of your poetry.



Caroline Shank

She could not abide the
accolades.  Every syllable
scratch and poked through
her.  Layer after layer the
thorns of praise tore her

until one day she stowed
stones in her pockets.
She walked along the
side of the water, not
thinking now, not even
the recitation of reasons.

Thousands of words
behind her and she
did not think they
mattered.  She walked
along the bank and
gathered pieces of
granite.  She hoarded
these like treasures

until she had enough.
The first step was
cold but unnoticed.

She walked into her
death like a nun who
no longer feared the
confessional.

Her hair floated around her
like seaweed, fingers
like fish.  She stopped
the flowers of language

until there were no
more petals.  She died
consumed by a
brownness welcomed
after the lighthouse
darkened.

Mrs Dalloway
never gladly held
another day.


Caroline Shank